Tenable Network Security: Columbia network security firm takes $50M investment from Silicon Valley VC Accel

Tenable Network Security, a Columbia-based firm started in 2002 that sells network security products to the U.S. government and companies the world over, received a big boost in September: a cool $50 million investment.
The people who signed the check? Accel Partners, a venture capital firm out in Silicon Valley that’s known for dropping $12 million on a small project thought up by Harvard graduate Mark Zuckerberg. It was Accel that invested during Facebook‘s first round of financing, when Zuckerberg had yet to remove the definite article “the” from his company’s name.

So $50 million from a VC firm whose stake in Facebook is now worth nearly $8 billion is nothing to sneeze at. What’s more: the $50 million investment in Tenable is the “biggest investment that Accel has ever made in a North American company,” according to the Baltimore Sun, an amount that accounted for one-third of Q3 venture funding in Maryland companies.
Before the $50 million, the only other source of outside funding was from the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, to the sum of $100,000. Otherwise, Tenable CEO Ron Gula and his partners grew the company through bootstrapping and the profits made.
And while Tenable is profitable and doesn’t need the money, it took the $50 million for its hiring and expansion efforts over the next three years, reports the Sun.